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Vanilla AI in 9.2 beta patch now builds very close to 40-width divisions.
- Thread starter blahmaster6k
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After reading through this thread, especially Reman's posts, I'm convinced that the best way to make historical divisions useable without causing undesirable side effects or consuming months of dev time, is to limit the division designer to 4x4.
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What I love about this "source" (it's a YouTube Video, might as well cite Wikipedia, right?)
Is that he apparently has made his correction because there are 36 guns in an ART battalion.
I do not see anyone arguing for 120 INF battlions in a division because 100 inf equipment are enough for 1000 soldiers...
Makes you wonder if that Argument actually holds water.
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NO! Does not make me wonder at all. He is a credible, well respected military historian.
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He is a credible and well respected historian, but @Zauberelefant makes a good point. MHV seems to have taken the number of artillery equipment used in an artillery battalion as a literal value, but did not take the number of infantry equipment used in an infantry battalion literally as well. That is an inconsistency. Even the brightest minds make mistakes occasionally. But this debate is going nowhere, neither of you are going to convince the other that they are wrong so why keep arguing? Instead we should discuss what a better option would be to make division width less relevant. Mods have already said to stop arguing.
Overall I don't think this discussion matters a whole lot at all. I don't particularly care if the most effective divisions in the game are historical or not, I just care that the AI can put up a fight against a decent players. If the AI uses the most effective divisions, that's fine with me.
If you don't want the AI using 40 width divisions, you can play with the Expert AI 4.0 mod and set the AI to build historical templates, letting you make the game as historical as you want it to be. If you want the AI to be really hard and make only 40 width divisions disregarding historicity, you can do that too. Let paradox focus on making the game the way they want it to be, and use mods when the whole reason they exist is to tailor the player's experience to their desires.
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If combat width is NOT changed along with that, it would just lead to divisions with ridiculously high numbers of artillery battalions.
Isn't the Infantry Equipment the equipment that a whole squad would use + assorted support equipment for larger organizational units? At least that's how I've imagined it to always be since you get panzerfausts, mortars, LMG and HMG and other equipment sorted into it and a single infantry guy cannot possible carry all that by himself.
The artillery branch though seems to depict mostly heavy guns in number.
It's debatable whether light artillery is part of infantry equipment or artillery equipment. Personally I like to imagine that smaller caliber guns are part of the artillery equipment but stuff like mortars is obviously infantry equipment. Just the way I roleplay though.
The artillery branch though seems to depict mostly heavy guns in number.
It's debatable whether light artillery is part of infantry equipment or artillery equipment. Personally I like to imagine that smaller caliber guns are part of the artillery equipment but stuff like mortars is obviously infantry equipment. Just the way I roleplay though.
Heavy Artillery is Support Artillery. Why would someone firing from far behind require frontage?
AA, pioneers (Engineers) and AT can be support too: no frontage.
Corps assets are not assets available for every single division. They are moved to where they are needed most and detached from their previous division. So you can't just add them to all divisions like that.
And there is also the question that real world artillery battalions had 12 guns. And UK had the most artillery, so not fair to bring them up. All other countries had less artillery.
Besides, I think that you agree that the historical setup is 9 infantry battalions. An infantry unit in game with 9 inf and a bunch of other stuff to fill to 40width and use it as your main infantry is ridiculous. No-one sane would ever use that. Which further shows that your argument has more holes then a swiss cheese.
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I'll add that corps assets don't work/are broken in HoI4. Do you see those random pure tank brigades that UK and France start with? Those represent corps-level assets that HoI4 can't handle properly with the template system.
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OK, i'll roll with it. But you should make clear the following:
What is heavy artillery to you? Because somehow you would believe that infantry gun calibres of up to 150mm are incorporated as infantry equipment, while actual artillery calibres used were ranging from 86mm (OQF 25 pdr) to 100mm, 105mm, 122 mm and 150/155mm.
So "heavy" artillery would be what exactly? And what is a hoi4 ART battalion supposed to represent? Same for line AT and AA.
Any component of a hoi4 division template is a battalion. Why would you think that ART is the exception? And if you Tell me "number of guns", I'll happily point to inf equipment.
No one said anything about adding corps assets to all divisions. That point was to show that these did in fact make divisions "40w".
British artillery was more numerous but considerably lighter than anyone else's. I can deal with them abstracly being the same as the 48 much heavier guns of the German division.
Your last point is nonsense, sorry. It is a non sequitur.
9 INF, 4 ART and a bunch of other stuff was a regular practical unit size in WW2.
An infantry division with that and its organic AT and AA is already 32 width. With a StuG battalion, Nebelwerfer btn and a heavy tank battalion, a classical reinforced assault division, tops out at 39 width.
I rest my case.
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Correct. But leaving Schw SS Pz Abtl 101 out of the picture is anything but historical. So, in order to make it work, it goes in the next infantry template in northern France.
I know it would still be possible to hit 40w by using 8 inf + 8 art. I just can't imagine that being viable from an org standpoint.
Well to be sure, the division designer necessarily involves discrepancies/problems. None of these problems justify the 40 width meta. I really would not care either except the combat dynamics richly reward 40 width for no rational reason, because two 20 width attack each division randomly, whereas a 40 width attacks concentrates on one division, knocking it out of the stack quickly.
I am also not convinced that mods will be the answer, because if they were someone would have creaeted a mod limiting width lower than what it is. Then you have the problem of great modes not being properly updated, etc.
I see it like this:
* Heavy Artillery is 120mm+, it fires only via indirect fire, so it can't use frontage. Historically armies of majors had 8 (USSR) or 12 heavy guns (USA, France), but it could also be a corps asset (Germany).
-> In game I see historical "Heavy Artillery" as being the "Support Artillery", the nr of guns matches even.
* Line Artillery is every other gun with 47mm+, the exactly amount of battalions that correspond to a game battalion remains controversial
* Line AA/AT is just if you have a lot of AT (which most countries had) vs having less AT (support AT). Most had few AA guns, so it matches better Support AA
So a historical division would be: 9 inf 3 art 1 at + support -> 28 width, but the game punishes this width so I tend to use 10 inf 2 art 1 at or 9 inf 3 art
You are missing the most important part of my critique: You are advocating for 9 INF + 4 ART + a bunch of other stuff.
But do you really play with this division?
Or do you advocate it, but in reality uses the completely non-sensical 14 inf + 4 art without any of the extra stuff that are the core of your argument?
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Just for the sake of correctness, German divisions had 1 battalion of 12 x 15 cm howitzers as Standard, plus 3x 12 x 105mm. Cannon of that calibre and higher calibres were corps assets. And I firmly believe that 4 historical battalions should be present in-game.
For AA, the German army had little and was reinforced by Luftwaffe flak battalions/regiments and even divisions, with units attached to Wehrmacht formations. So, an actual AA battalion belongs in the template.
The divisions had the AT capabilities of 2 AT battalions between the division and its regiments.
You might want to rethink frontage, because except for the 25 pdr gun, artillery was rarely used in direct fire. And engineers in combat would certainly use frontage, would they not? As would AT guns.
And I do play with the proposed division design.
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The best idea for eliminating the 40w meta that I have seen is to RNG the combat width in each battle between 60-100 depending on terrain. This would make larger divisions better in open areas, and vice versa. This would eliminate the cookie cutter divisions.
So, if 105mm is line art and 150mm is line art, then what is support artillery in your oppinion? And why it requires no frontage?
I do agree that artillery (and AT & AA) shouldn't require frontage because they are relatively small compared to the sea of man, and require only a relatively small opening in the line even for direct fire.
But I disagree that direct fire was rare in ww2 and multiple sources say it wasn't.
I read somewhere that in 41 & 42 the soviets preferred Direct Fire because they had many guns but few ammo. And direct fire is more precise. Also read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_fire#Description and https://books.google.pl/books/about/Field_Artillery_and_Firepower.html?id=4M_Q6vWMshgC&redir_esc=y
>>>During World War II direct fire remained secondary to indirect fire, although it was used profusely in situations where indirect fire was less effective, and new direct-fire artillery such as anti-tank guns and anti-aircraft guns were developed.<<<
Because they are brought forward for specific combat situations (minefields, fortress destruction, etc), and then they go to the back again.
If you have 1k man defending 1 km, why exactly adding 24 AT guns would cause you to defend 2km now? They should be placed in between the man, and shouldn't increase frontage.
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I actually think that support artillery would best fit for airborne and Mountain guns as well as heavy mortars (4.2" or 120 mm). Maybe they are infantry guns? But them not using width is a stupid concept. Support companies Mix rear Units like maintenance and Hospital with combat units like engineers and artillery. That is nonsensical.
Once again, i think that you misunderstand combat width and think it's EUIV style frontage. It's not like that. Width is more a logistical value than "place in the 2nd Dimension taken by unit". That would also mean that divisions don't have reserves, which is untrue.
That being said, your own source agrees that direct fire was a secondary role. Which I do not refute. The soviets had 76.2 mm dual purpose guns as light artillery/anti tank guns, so theirs is a special case. In general, howitzers are indirect guns. At 14 km range, you cannot aim directly.
You do not understand the width concept in hoi4. It's silly named, sure, but it does not translate into "direct contact area to enemy". It's more like: amount of supplied troops we can locally Bring to bear.
The whole point here is that the division designer fails to create historical divisions at any given rate and there are two schools of thought in this forum:
The first holds that, due to combat width restraints, 27w must be historical (which is by any stretch of the definition wrong). I could get behind 27 as proper division size under certain conditions, such as having ART battalions have gun count and width cut to 1/3.
The other school of thought takes the current state of the game and argues that historical divisions would be between 30 and 40 width, which then allows for units not present otherwise, like heavy tanks, Rocket launchers and tank destroyers to be useful as permanent Attachments to certain divisions.
If the land combat system gets redone, I Vote im favour of disbanding the current design system altogether, though.
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This is asked a lot and from all the answers I have seen I believe that there is no answer in the game mechanics since artillery is all the same in game. For one, support artillery in game is overpowered when compared to line artillery battalions, but uses the exact same equipment. I wonder if that was intended. Did the developers believe that people would instinctively use line artillery in their division designs along with support artillery? If players did that, then support artillery might have been larger tubed guns, but since both use the same equipment, it did not take long for players to ditch historical type TOEs for META builds.
At the end of the day there is only one size or type of artillery in the game that you can build and deploy. The game lets us upgrade this one type artillery and for flavor calls the upgrades different sizes, but those are just words. The reality is there is only one artillery type, with upgrades.
As for frontage, my personal opinion is that only the infantry and tanks should take up frontage. Everything else is behind the front. The AT guns and other direct fire weapons easily fit in among the front line combat units without causing any displacement. I believe the developers put widths on artillery units to prevent players from putting an unrealistic number of artillery battalions into their divisions. It may have been the cleanest fix, but it is unfortunate, since it is part of the reason many people just do not use line artillery in infantry divisions. They instead make org walls. Not a very good learning experience, but a decent game strategy.
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I think, you are quiet correct with this assumption.
My suggestion:
- If ART should stick to 3w, they should get an increase of attack-stats.
or:
- IF ART should get 2w or 1w, they should get a significant decrease of ORG. ( I'm not sure whether AI could handle that properly )